Before daylight saving kicks in every March, our practice window is fixed: we start at 3:40, and the way our field sits, it’s darn near pitch black by 6:15. That’s it. That’s the whole window. And somewhere inside it, we’ve got to get 35 to 40 guys quality work.
We don’t have lights on our field. Never have. Our complex, Paladin Park, sits under a contract with the City of Roswell that rules out lights and sound out there – baseball, softball, tennis, the whole facility. So when the sun goes down, practice goes with it. No flipping a switch to buy another hour.
We’ve got parents willing to help us make lights happen. Every time we bring it up to the city, people from outside our boundaries show up and stand in the way. That’s frustrating. But like I tell our boys all the time: some things are out of our control. This is one of them. That doesn’t mean we stop trying. It means we don’t let the thing we can’t control decide whether the thing we can control- how we use the time we do have- gets our best effort.
For a long time, I treated the no-lights window like a limitation. Something to apologize for. Something other programs, the ones with lights and turf and a budget line for facilities, didn’t have to think about.
I don’t think that anymore.
The Practice That Taught Me Nothing
When I first got to Fellowship, we had 17 kids on the roster. Getting a full slate of quality reps into two hours with 17 guys was no problem. You could run loose, let a drill breathe, and everybody still touched the ball plenty.
As we grew, that math stopped working. More rosters, same window, and the time crunch got worse every year.
Early in my career, before I’d figured any of this out, practice ran on vibes. We’d start with stretch and throw, move into infield/outfield, break into stations because that’s what everybody’s practice plan looked like, and just… go. No clock on any of it. A drill ended when it felt like it should end, which usually meant it ended when I got bored watching it or when the group doing it started fading.
Here’s what that actually produced: kids standing in lines. A lot of them. The best hitter on the team getting the same number of live reps as the kid who needed six times as many just to catch up. Coaches running stations they’d copied off a clinic handout without ever asking whether it translated to a game situation.
Busy is not the same thing as productive. I had to get burned by a few of those long, foggy practices before that distinction actually landed.
The Turn
The no-lights limit didn’t create that problem. Growing from 17 kids to 40 just made it impossible to keep ignoring it.
When you’ve got unlimited time and a small roster, you can absorb a wasted drill and barely notice. When your practice window closes the second the sun drops behind that tree line, and you’ve got 40 guys needing reps, every wasted minute is a rep somebody didn’t get. The constraint doesn’t lower the bar. It raises it, because now there’s no slack left to hide the parts of your practice plan that were never really working.
What Changed
Every station runs on a clock, not a headcount. We don’t say “everybody gets five swings.” We say “you’ve got six minutes.” A clock forces pace. A headcount lets your slowest group set the tempo for the whole field, and the sun does not wait on your slowest group.
The stations themselves are built to eliminate dead time. On our individual offense days, we run roughly eight stations: on-field, base running, shag, shag, fastball cage, breaking ball cage, small ball/bunts, and on-deck. That last one, on-deck, is the one that speeds up everything else. Instead of waiting on a group to jog down from the cages before we can start the next rotation, the on-deck group is already staged and ready. The second we’re picked up, we call out live action and the drills are already going. No dead air between rotations. We run three types of individual offense days: Execution Days, Approach Days, and Pack Hack Days, each with its own focus, plus two team offense days where we run a live, defensive-focused BP against an actual defense, working game-speed reps instead of a cage swing.
JV and Varsity practice together. That’s not just about logistics. When a freshman runs a drill next to a senior who’s been in the program four years, he sees what the standard actually looks like, not a poster description of it, but a live example of it. That’s a lesson for a different day on its own, but I’ll say this much here: don’t just throw your JV team in the cages for two hours and then complain they aren’t ready when it’s their turn to step into the varsity lineup. That’s on us as coaches, not on them.
We group by readiness, not by age or roster spot. This is the 10-80-10 rule showing up on the dirt, not just in the way I think about roster culture. Your top 10 percent do not need to stand next to a kid still learning the fundamentals and wait their turn. Group your best together and let them push each other’s pace. Group the ones who need more instruction together and give a coach direct time with them. Mixing everybody together out of some flattened idea of fairness isn’t fairness. It’s just slower for everyone.
Every drill has to answer one question before it makes the practice plan: does this translate to a live at-bat, a live pitch, a live defensive rep? If a drill exists because it looks good on a whiteboard, it’s the first thing that gets cut when daylight is short.
And when we say we’re done at 6:00, we’re done at 6:00. Don’t ask me how I learned that one the hard way. Your ninth-grade parents most likely have other kids to pick up, and if you let practice bleed 30 minutes past when you told them, they will hold it against you, and they should. Do we go over sometimes? Sure. But we’re locked in on finishing on time. That means on some of our individual BP days, some guys might not make it all the way through the on-field station rotation before we have to wrap. The varsity guys always do. Everybody still gets their reps. Nobody’s parents are sitting in a parking lot wondering where their coach’s word went.
None of that is groundbreaking. Coaches have been saying “quality reps over total reps” for as long as there’s been a game to coach. But saying it and actually building a practice plan that enforces it, one where kids know exactly where to be and what’s next without a coach having to herd them there, are two different disciplines. The no-lights field is what forced me from the first one into the second.
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” (Ecclesiastes 9:10, ESV)
That verse isn’t about working longer. It’s about working with your whole self while the work is actually in front of you, because the window doesn’t stay open forever. Daylight closes on a field without lights the same way a season closes on a career, the same way an opportunity closes on a kid who’s not ready when it opens. You don’t get the window back. You only get what you did with it.
What This Costs You If You Get It Wrong
A team that practices long but not well shows up in May looking tired instead of sharp. Your best players get bored standing in lines built for your slowest learner. Your developing players don’t get the direct coaching attention they actually need. And you, the head coach, end up believing your program is working hard when what it’s actually doing is working long. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them shows up on the scoreboard.
Figure It Out and Push
In 2022, we won a school record number of games. That whole regular season, we didn’t practice on an actual baseball field once. We worked out of a 30×60 yard piece of turf and a two-lane hitting facility. Now we’re blessed with some of the best facilities in the country, and I’ll tell you straight: that doesn’t mean we relax. It just makes our job a little easier and lets me get even more creative.
Don’t let outside limitations hinder your ability to develop your young men. Figure it out. Push. The facility isn’t the program. What you do inside whatever window you’ve got is the program.
This Week
Time your next practice. Not roughly; actually use a stopwatch. Track how many minutes your team spends standing and waiting versus how many minutes they spend in an actual competitive rep, swing, throw, at-bat, defensive read. If the waiting number is anywhere close to the reps number, you’ve found your leak.
Then pick one drill off your practice plan this week, just one, and ask whether it would survive being cut for time if the sun dropped forty-five minutes early tomorrow. If the honest answer is “we’d be fine without it,” cut it now instead of waiting for a field with no lights to force your hand.
You don’t need more hours to build a better program. You need fewer wasted minutes inside the hours you already have.
Greater Together
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